


Death By Chocolate

by SilchasRuin



Series: Don’t Fear The Reaper [2]
Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Afterlife, Bickering, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, M/M, Mystery, Post-Canon, Reluctant Buddy Cops, The Awkward Family Dynamic of Having Sort Of Murdered One's Own Father, Thriller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-02-19 07:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22840615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilchasRuin/pseuds/SilchasRuin
Summary: A long time ago, L had feared that death would be terribly boring. But with a presumably reformed mass-murderer at his side, a plethora of more-or-less interesting cases to solve, and a seemingly infinite supply of chaos from the inhabitants of Wammy's House, L has to admit that his afterlife is far more enjoyable than he would ever have imagined.But, even though those who are already dead cannot die again, old habits die hardest of all. And when a face from L's past challenges him to a detectives' contest, L soon realizes that far worse things than death lurk beneath the afterlife's seemingly peaceful surface.Sequel to "Death Is Not The End."
Relationships: L/Yagami Light
Series: Don’t Fear The Reaper [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1618576
Comments: 52
Kudos: 84





	1. Fire And Water

"We," L announces as he kicks the door open with just enough force to be appropriately dramatic, "have a problem."

"Hello to you too, L," Light says calmly, still scanning the sheaf of papers in his hand.

"Perhaps I should rephrase," L says, tilting his head quizzically. One of Light's legs is draped casually over the edge of the sofa; he reclines against the back of the couch in a position that looks effortlessly elegant and graceful, but which, when L stops to think about it for a second, actually looks extraordinarily uncomfortable.

A quick flicker of his eyes to the table confirms that Light's phone - and, undoubtedly, the feed from the doorbell camera - is face-down on the table. Clearly, Light saw him approaching, and has defaulted to his normal state of unfairly attractive petulance. With a shrug, L continues. "We have a _serious_ problem."

"My day was fine, thank you for asking," Light says, not even looking up from his document. "How was your day?"

L taps his lips thoughtfully, tilting his head further. "You seem to be making some sort of social statement. How characteristically frivolous of you."

Light's eye twitches fractionally before stabilizing. "In social circles that are _not_ comprised entirely of raving lunatics, it is generally considered polite to _inform_ people before you leave the country for a week-"

"But I did inform you, Yagami-kun," L says in his best innocent voice, watching Light's eye twitch again at his scrupulous politeness.

"With _words,_ L," he snarls. "That means in person. Not via incomprehensible text message!"

"Surely it was not incomprehensible," L says, deliberately widening his eyes in fake shock. "You are possessed of some deductive skill, after all."

As usual, Light completely ignores his generous compliment in favour of snatching his phone from the table, scrolling through his messages with rather more force than necessary. "'brb, gn 2 Liechtenstein, c u l8r?' What the hell is _that_ supposed to be, L?"

"It represents an efficiency increase of 60.71%-"

"Efficiency?! Bullshit," Light snaps, shoving the phone at him. "You typed out 'Liechtenstein,' L!"

"I was simply being polite," L says, blinking at him. "There is no accepted chatspeak abbreviation for Liechtenstein, after all. And besides, my case was rather urgent."

"Really."

"Really!" L gives him a beatific smile. "There was a pressing case of theft-"

"There was a pressing case of you wanting to fob your paperwork off on me while you gallivanted around Europe," Light says, folding his arms.

"Gallivant?" L considers this. _"Do_ I gallivant?"

"You ooze," Light says immediately. "Like a slime mold."

"Hmmm." Slime molds are absorbent, are they not? A charming compliment, in a certain light. "Accurate," he says gravely. "So, _did_ you do the paperwork?"

A smirk stretches across Light's face. "I sent it to Mello," he says, practically radiating smugness. "With an _extra_ special note from you. You really need better security on your personal e-mail address, you know."

"You truly are evil," L says appreciatively.

"And yet, I am somehow the moral compass of this partnership."

"A broken compass can be correct occasionally, when pointed in the right direction," L says mildly, grinning at Light's exaggerated eye roll. "How _was_ your day, by the way?"

"Insufferably dull," Light says immediately. "Two disappearances, both simple runaways. One," he says with no small amount of disgruntlement, "was hiding out less than a mile away from her usual residence."

"A day of public service," L says, deadpan.

"Exactly." Light stretches, rolling his shoulders. "Tell me you have something more interesting."

"Infinitely," L says, leaning in for a kiss. 

When they finally pull apart, that familiar smirk is playing across Light's lips again. "That's it?"

"As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, we really do have a problem," L says regretfully. "It seems as if Marie Deneuve has developed some woefully misguided ideas about our respective competences as detectives."

"Deneuve," Light murmurs. "Wasn't that one of your aliases?" He snaps his fingers. "You beat her in some sort of detective contest, didn't you? How badly did you cheat?"

"I won that contest fairly," L says reproachfully. Fairly by his standards, at any rate. Everybody knows that there are no rules in war.

Light folds his arms, clearly unimpressed. "So far, this sounds like _your_ problem to deal with, L."

Recalcitrance again. It appears to be Light's new favourite tactic. Perhaps he's getting predictable, or perhaps L simply knows him too well.

Or, as a far more likely possibility, Light simply uses this strategy because he also knows exactly how L will respond to it.

This time, there is nothing even vaguely innocent about L's smile as he leans forward once more. He'll never admit it out loud, of course. But predictability, as it turns out, does have some rather large benefits.

***

These are the things L likes best about Light Yagami:

He is sharp, sharp as the edge of a knife; so sharp that it's almost impossible for him not to cut himself, but still cunning enough to balance on that fine tightrope and not plummet to his death. His every aspect is a weapon, seemingly crafted in every aspect to counter L's own - subtle where the detective is blunt, overwhelming when he would be relentlessly methodical. Each word that passes his lips conceals a hundred hidden secrets; a thousand more lie in the curves of his half-smile. And beneath that polite, elegant exterior, there burns a passion which even the blood of thousands has failed to utterly extinguish. Even now, Light is still utterly and irrevocably in love with the idea of justice.

L is very aware that these are exactly the same things that he had completely _detested_ about Light Yagami when he had first faced him as Kira. He is 98.6% certain that this says something fundamentally disturbing about his own psychology, but he's long since accepted that that's probably a lost cause anyway, so he dismisses that thought as irrelevant.

He is jarred from his contemplation by an exclamation of horror from Light, who has taken advantage of his distraction to deftly steal L's phone from his side of the bed. "Why are you subscribed to so many spam newsletters?"

"Matt," L says immediately. "After you provoked him and Mello, I suppose."

"But there must be several _hundred_ of these!" Light scrolls frantically downward, vainly attempting to find Deneuve's message in the cluttered hellscape. "Do you not even bother deleting these?" L raises his eyebrows at him, and Light sighs. "Right. I forgot who I was talking to. Never mind."

"Yagami-kun is truly an old man, for his memories to have so deserted him," L says solemnly, reaching over to give Light's head a solicitous pat.

"I'm still younger than you," Light says, rolling his eyes. "I died when I was twenty-four, remember?"

"You say that as if it is an accomplishment," L says mildly.

"Considering that I'm the more mature one, it really is." Light smiles triumphantly, evidently having finally found Deneuve's e-mail. He frowns briefly at the innocuous image of a stylized M attached to the email before rolling his eyes.

"Steganography?" he grumbles, reaching for his laptop. "Could she not have just sent a politely worded card like a normal person?"

"Deneuve does not believe in politeness," L informs him. "I find her quite tolerable, actually."

Light ignores him in favour of extracting the text file embedded within the image. The message within is brief and to the point:

_Unusual series of mispers in Paris. Rematch?_

Light narrows his eyes, considering the two short sentences carefully. "So. There have been several disappearances, and this Deneuve believes that they are connected somehow?"

That much is clear from the message. L understands Light's caution, but Deneuve is not the sort of person to conceal hidden meanings within her words. "We will never know, unless we accept her challenge."

Light's eyes narrow further. "And what, exactly, do you mean by 'we?'"

"Why, you, me, Matt, and Mello, of course," L says innocently. "And Watari, although that goes without saying. Since Mello is probably quite angry at me, I am sure you would be happy to inform him that he will be coming along with us?"

Light groans, burying his face in his hands. Beside him, L's phone lies unlocked on the bed, a dodgy-looking webpage signaling Light's painstaking efforts to start unsubscribing L from his five hundred new spam mailing lists. "I hate you. I really, really hate you."

L beams at him. He loves Light, too.

***

The last time L had met Deneuve, it had been across a pitched battlefield of wits and resources - Deneuve's information networks, L's deductive reasoning, and Coil's penchant for manipulation and mayhem clashing together in an attempt to track down a particularly clever murderer with a startling talent for disguising her crimes as accidents. To this day, L is still not entirely certain that the three of them had managed to find _all_ of her victims. There are only so many years that one can follow a trail before it grows cold, after all, and every killer must start somewhere.

The nature of crime in the afterlife, of course, is quite different.

The first, and most obvious change, is that the dead cannot die again. As such, murder is an impossibility here. It's quite a good thing that Light's murderous alter-ego shuffled off the mortal coil in Purgatory. The entire concept would probably have constituted Kira's worst nightmare.

The observation, however, implies far more nightmares than Kira's alone. After all, when viewed from a different angle, immortality provides infinite opportunities for suffering and pain.

Perhaps having anticipated this, the afterlife possesses a second, unique quality: those who commit egregious enough crimes are somehow instantly sent back to Purgatory, returning only after a second pass through their own, personal hell. Interestingly enough, as far as anyone can tell, all memories of their afterlife before this second Purgatory trip are erased. It's the closest thing to death that anyone can achieve in the afterlife, and more-or-less provides some sort of solution to the infinite torture problem. L can think of several workarounds off the top of his head, of course, but as stopgap measures go, it's decent enough.

These aspects of the afterlife combine to render missing persons cases and thefts as the two most interesting sorts of puzzles that he and Light have taken to solving as consulting detectives. Mispers, in particular, represent a fascinating range of possibilities. In most cases, the missing individual turns out to simply have run away, with varying degrees of success and competence. An eternity spent living the same life does get boring to some, and chances for a fresh start are quite literally endless. But, on occasion, the solution to the case is far darker. A person could have been imprisoned or kidnapped, the victim of some sort of crime; conversely, they could have been whisked away to Purgatory, the perpetrator of some dread offense of their own. Repentance is a fine concept, but cannot completely erase human nature.

In almost every case that L has seen, the disappearances have been separate from each other. On rare occasion, people will run away together, or collaborate on crimes; still, the very nature of the afterlife makes such things rather uncommon.

But a _series_ of disappearances? Presumably connected to each other?

L smiles widely, leaning back and letting the sound of Light's grumbling as he attempts to pack what seems to be the entire contents of his closet wash over him. He is 99.3% certain that his team will emerge triumphant in this contest.

More importantly, he is 100% sure that no matter what, it will certainly be _very_ interesting.


	2. Walk On Water

"This," Mello proclaims, scowling so fiercely that it seems as if his face is in danger of cracking open, "is _bullshit."_

"What an interesting observation, Mello," Light says flatly. "None of us have heard _that_ one before." Behind him, L shakes his head mournfully as the squabbling intensifies. When it comes to sarcasm, subtlety is really not one of Light's strong suits. Come to think of it, he and Mello are actually quite similar in that regard.

Perhaps it's not such a bad thing that they don't get along. L has secretly been rather enjoying the lack of organized crime in the afterlife.

"Don't you guys get bored of having the exact same argument every single time you meet?" Matt asks, rather sensibly.

"Out of the five of us here, four have been killed by _him,"_ Mello snaps. "Don't you think that kind of, maybe, ever-so-slightly constitutes a really big fucking problem?"

"Not really," L says mildly.

"See?" Mello says, pointing an accusing finger at him. "That, right there, is part of the problem I'm talking about!"

Matt clears his throat. "I mean, we kind of killed him back, in a way. Indirectly."

"Can I point out that I didn't kill you two directly, either?"

Without breaking eye contact with Light, Mello pulls a vaguely person-shaped chocolate from the pocket of his vest, unwraps it, and savagely beheads it with one overambitious bite. L resists the urge to smile proudly. Clearly, he has taught the boy everything he knows.

"All right, surrounding seats are empty," Matt announces. "Mission accomplished."

Mello snorts rudely, ripping the chocolate man's arm off. "Right. All for the mission," he mutters darkly. "Because I don't have any particular reason to be pissed at this asshole, here."

L nods along sympathetically. He detects some lingering traces of antipathy there, but with Light's lack of people skills, that is only to be expected. "Very well," he says, arranging himself comfortably in his seat. "What did you find?"

Matt pulls up a file on his laptop, spinning the screen around to face them. "Well, first of all, Paris' recent list of disappearances doesn't look too out-of-the-ordinary. The numbers look about right based on the trends over the past few years, the demographics tend to be pretty even - with a slight skew towards men - and I'm seeing concentrated hotspots in areas with high populations of deaders. Seems pretty normal, right?"

"If by 'deaders', you mean people who have been dead for at least three centuries, then certainly," Light says primly.

"Aw, come on," Matt protests. "It's common slang; even the deaders use it. You can't tell me you haven't even heard of it."

"Probably too busy making new deaders," Mello grumbles, folding his arms.

"Well, no, 'cause the timeline's, like, all wrong-"

"Whatever, Matt," Mello says, rolling his eyes.

"I sense a 'but' in your statistical analysis, Matt," L prompts, ever the voice of reason.

"Oh, yeah!" Matt's face brightens as he pulls up a densely populated plot, festooned with red dots. "So, you said that Deneuve mentioned a _series,_ right? That means that she's talking about a bunch of connected disappearances. So I plotted all the reported disappearances over the past year, then removed all the ones whose disappearances were resolved, or can be basically considered to be resolved. Those are the deaders-" With a click of his mouse, a significant portion of the dots turn dark. "-or the ones who ran away and were later found, or those who popped up later after a brief stint in Purgatory, or all the false alarms." With each subsequent click, more and more of the graph darkens, until a relatively small group of red dots stand out against the background.

"Still a lot of fucking dots," Mello says.

"Yeah, well." Matt shrugs. "With every single dead person in the history of, like, _everything_ taking up their own little chunk of real estate, things are bound to get kind of crazy, y'know? We're lucky to only be dealing with a couple hundred, honestly. It's been a slow year for Paris."

"No kidding," Mello snorts.

"Anyways, Deneuve didn't say how many people make a 'series', but it's got to be enough to suggest some sort of connection in this giant mess of stuff. So I started by taking a closer look at the cases that were left. Seeing if I could find anything that stood out. Location, age - well, approximate age, for some of the really old ones - jobs. You know, the usual. But here's the really interesting part." He leans forward, swiveling his head to stare at each one of them in turn. "I couldn't find anything unusual at all."

"Not linked by neighbourhood, then," L notes. "A promising start."

"What about the 'deaders?'" Light asks. "You ruled them out at first because disappearances in that group are so common, but what if Deneuve is referring to someone targeting them to disguise their crimes?"

"Ah, ah!" Matt raises a finger. "You're getting ahead of yourself, man. Here's the thing. Whatever connects those mispers, it's probably something that's not too obvious, or Deneuve probably wouldn't have proposed a detecting contest involving them. But it also has to be something that stood out enough for her to notice in the first place. Deaders tend to either group together in small communities, be connected to pretty much everything, or be connected to practically nothing. Hermit types. Group disappearances are actually pretty common among the first set, linked to loads of stuff in the second, and sometimes go unreported for decades in the third. Pretty unlikely that Deneuve would investigate those guys, I think."

Mello lobs his sweet wrapper at him, slowly enough for Matt to dodge. "Yeah, yeah, you're a fucking genius, Matt. We know you obviously found _something,_ so how about you just tell us already?"

"Now, now, Mello," L chides. "Dramatic tension is the prerogative of any good detective."

"Dramatic tension is for sidekicks!" L looks between him and Light pointedly, raising his eyebrows. "Ugh, whatever," Mello declares, sitting back in a huff. "I can't believe I actually _missed_ you, you jerk."

"Condescension builds character," Light says, running his hand through his hair in a pointlessly distracting manner. He catches L's errant glance, smirking. "Or, at the very least, coping stratagems."

Mello snickers for a moment before he catches himself, a look of outrage passing across his face. "Don't make me laugh, you asshole! You know that I'll have to fucking stab you or something if you make me laugh again, right?"

Light raises his hands in mock surrender. "I will be more careful, Mello. After all, I wouldn't want us to end up in Purgatory together."

Mello's face puckers in speechless horror. In response, one corner of Light's lips twitches almost unconsciously in a predatory half-grin. L supposes that they should technically be counting their blessings that Mello doesn't notice it, but he has to admit that it is entertaining to watch Light being unleashed on someone else, for a change.

"So, as I was saying," Matt says, more than a little impatiently. "Since I couldn't find anything on my first pass, I thought I'd try working backwards. Start with cases likely to have Deneuve called in, and check to see if those cases were connected to any others. We've got fifteen or so that made major news in at least one outlet. Now, between you guys and me, seven of those were pretty much shoo-ins for Purgatory, and I'd bet Mello's last chocolate bar they're still stuck in there somewhere."

"Bet your own stuff, Matt!"

"Your chocolate would be safe, Mello," L says solemnly, scanning the list of names highlighted on Matt's screen. He agrees with Matt's assessment completely. Honestly, he's not even sure why the disappearance of some of those names counted as 'news', in the first place. "There is a 88.3% possibility of its being safe, at least."

Mello's eyes widen. "Only 88.3%?! Hey, Matt, you jerk! Bargain your own bloody things!"

"Come _on,_ Mello," Matt says, exasperated. "You know L's a rotten liar with those numbers; he doesn't say anything unless it's 100%." In his peripheral vision, Light's head whips around to fix him with a narrow-eyed glare. L smiles innocently, pointedly doing his best to ignore him.

"Okay, well, since nobody's attention span is apparently up to the task of hearing how awesome I am, I'll cut to the chase," Matt grumbles. He taps a few keys, then swivels his screen around to face them again. "Agathe Dumaine, one hundred and sixty-seven years dead. Married three times - first one, her pre-death husband, went off to Purgatory at some point and never really turned up again, and she had an amicable parting with the second. She was still married to the third at the time of her disappearance. He's the one who called it in, in fact."

L cocks his head, interested, as he scans the brief profile on Matt's screen. One line stands out, making it immediately obvious why Matt had zeroed in on her case in particular, but Light is the first to voice it. "Hold on a second. This says that the police initially closed the case, then reopened it at the husband's insistence - and then they arrested him and promptly cut him loose again?" His voice has a slight edge of disbelief to it, or perhaps simple astonishment at the level of incompetence conveyed in that simple statement.

"Weird, right?" Matt says happily, evidently pleased that someone is finally paying attention. "Apparently the husband, Christophe, had a bit of a jealousy problem - plus the two of them had been on the rocks lately - so they picked him up pretty much as soon as they bothered looking into Agathe's disappearance in the first place. He had a pretty smart lawyer, though. Between the lack of evidence and all the media attention they got, the police had to let him go to avoid the bad press."

Light's lips thin with disapproval. "I sincerely hope that the common theme here is not whatever this mess with the police investigation is."

No, L thinks, not in the slightest. It is highly unlikely for a string of disappearances to be localized to Paris and yet not present any similarities in demographic or location. The solution, as L sees it, must be the most simple explanation. "This was the killer's mistake, then."

Matt claps his hands together, excited enough to slip out of his characteristic slouch. "Exactly!" he exclaims, pointing at L. "Even when examining less common datapoints, there's no more than two or three points of connection among the other cases that got a lot of media attention. And this one is unique, because nobody could have predicted that this Christophe would get such a bee in his bonnet about his soon-to-be estranged wife. Any potential culprit somehow involved in this might have been going for people that nobody would miss. People whose cases wouldn't gain police attention."

"So we're back to square one," Mello says, disgruntled. "All this fucker had to do was go for deaders, and even _we_ probably wouldn't find him."

"Like a needle in a haystack," Light says, no more happily than Mello. "Especially considering that we have no way of accounting for unreported cases, either."

"Yeah, but you guys are missing the point! Agathe's disappearance went down eight months ago, right? And I'm wondering, you know, what if our guy got a taste for the attention? What if he started moving on to cases that were more likely to generate some buzz? Cases that might catch Deneuve's eye?"

"How many did you find?" L asks.

"Seven," Matt says. Beside him, L can almost sense Light's eyebrows shooting upward. "They're all over the map. Ages, genders, locations, none of that clusters in the slightest. But Agathe's the oldest of the cases - the rest are under one-fifty - and she's close, geographically, to the second case. Makes me think our guy might have started in one area and then gotten the idea to fan out, cover his tracks. Kind of like you did, Light."

Light grimaces. "At least I struck all across Japan. If we have a friendly neighbourhood killer, that's a far better point to start from."

"We are getting ahead of ourselves once again," L says calmly. "Matt, if the cases are 'all over the map', as you put it, what makes you think that they're connected?"

"Timing," he says. For the first time, Matt looks a little shaken. "There's one every thirty days after Agathe's death, L. There's a pattern. They alternate between men and women, but they're all married. They all made it into at least one minor news outlet. And, before Agathe, I've got one deader who disappeared sixty days before her in about the same area. Can't find anything else, though."

"Unreported cases," Light says quietly. "If someone is behind this, they could have been at this for quite a while."

"Hang on," Mello says, looking more than a little disturbed. "So you said these cases happen every thirty days, right? Then...how much time do we have?"

"Thirteen days." Together, they stare at the map of Paris Expanded, that enormous metropolis of the dead which only swells with each hour, growing horizontally and vertically as the world stretches to accommodate all of the newly dead.

Matt doesn't say that they have no idea where the presumed culprit will strike, or how they choose their targets, or who might be next on the firing line. He doesn't need to.

All L knows for sure is: whoever the culprit is, they have a seventeen-day head start.

And, looking around at his team, L smiles to himself and thinks: _They're going to need it._

***

Deneuve meets them in a long-abandoned tavern deep in the heart of a district that even the deaders have abandoned, half-hearted heritage signs staving off their inevitable bulldozing for just a little while longer. Not too much longer, of course. Even the dead need changes of scenery from time to time, and the prestige of having a house freshly built post-mortem always ensures that they sell like hotcakes.

"Ah, good. You are finally here." Deneuve's voice is permanently hoarse, a side-effect of the cigarettes which even now protrude from her absurdly small jacket pockets. She and her team of bruisers lean nonchalantly against whatever available surfaces haven't crumbled or rotted away. A pair of oversized sunglasses hide half her face, an affectation L remembers, and streaks of gray now run through her short brown hair, which he doesn't recall. She must have lasted about five years or so after losing their contest. Still, she seems to have done well enough for herself. A suit like the one she's casually exposing to several decades' worth of mold is expensive, and her goons give her a well-calculated mafia chic air. Mello looks as if he wants to take notes.

"Can we finally get out of here?" Coil demands. In contrast to Deneuve, he stands stiffly in a relatively intact corner, doing his best not to touch anything or even inhale too deeply. Coil's team isn't with him, as expected. He never had been one to reveal the angle he was playing up until the last possible moment, when the trap had already been sprung.

"Some patience will not kill you, Coil." Deneuve's head swivels slightly, shifting towards L and his group. "You both know why we are here, yes?"

"Thirteen days," L says.

"Jacques Corbin," Coil says, naming the most recent disappearance.

"Excellent," Deneuve says briskly, rubbing her hands together. "We will agree on the rules, then. No _deliberate_ sabotage-" Nothing that can be proven, at any rate. "-and no victory declared for partial success." Success, of course, refers to apprehension of the culprit, one way or another. "Yes? This is acceptable? No additions?" Both L and Coil shake their heads minutely. "Then may the best of us win." With an imperious nod, she turns and marches out of one of the giant holes in the side of the building, her followers filing out obediently behind her.

"Wait, what?" Mello blinks. "That's it?"

"A woman of few words," Light says dryly.

"Yes," L nods. "I like her."

Light rolls his eyes. "Of course you do."

"So, uh, do we just go?" Matt looks around warily at the spot Coil had previously occupied. Coil, of course, has long since disappeared into the shadows.

"Matt, you will be rendezvousing with Watari at our base," L says. "Each detective is provided access to shared police databases, of course, so you will see if official access can provide you with any further information on our disappearance cases. Mello, Light, you will come with me. I believe our first stop is clear."

"No offense," Light says carefully, meaning of course that maximal offense is intended, "but should we really be bringing _him_ along on a sensitive interview with a grief-stricken widower?" He jerks his thumb over at Mello, who just shrugs his shoulders and mouths something that looks suspiciously like 'mass-fucking-murderer.'

"I think that the two of you should complement each other nicely," L says with a straight face, and is rewarded with twin glares from both of them. Thus satisfied, he settles into a comfortable hunch, pulling out his phone to call a taxi. Coil's watchers will probably be tailing them all the way, of course, but the implied feud between his team members ought to provide a nice distraction. What matters is that, when things come down to the wire, Light and Mello will co-operate. Neither of them enjoy losing any more than L himself does.

They have only thirteen days to prevent the next disappearance, after all.

And, contest or no contest, L intends to make every minute count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A rather delayed chapter! Things have been a little crazy, as I'm sure you all know. I do have some more time to write now, at least, so here's hoping I'll have the next chapter up much quicker than the previous one.


	3. Drag the Waters

"So you are _all_ detectives?" Christophe Dumaine's forehead wrinkles as he stares suspiciously at them. "All three of you?"

Light's encouraging smile is ever-so-slightly forced as he turns to give L a brief, withering look. Mello, who is lounging against the far wall in a quilted vest while steadily munching his way through another chocolate bar, has apparently been abandoned as a lost cause. "Yes, Monsieur Dumaine. My colleagues are somewhat unconventional, but I assure you that they are among the best in their fields."

"Call me Christophe. It will be a mouthful otherwise, when I answer the same questions once again for the tenth or twelfth time," the older man grumbles. Christophe's file pegs him as a neat, round hundred years dead; the anniversary of his appearance in the afterlife is only two months past. He doesn't look much like he's celebrated anything in a long time, though. L estimates the growth of his unkempt beard at around eight months, and the red rims of his sunken eyes stand silent testimony to endless nights spent waiting for a knock at the door that never comes.

The eyes of a guilty man, a more cynical person might have thought.

But L has never been _cynical,_ per se. He's a realist. And one look at the disorganized piles of dirty dishes and genuinely haphazard clutter of Christophe's apartment is enough to tell him that, realistically, this isn't their guy. If there truly is someone behind these disappearances, they are looking for someone who prizes order, who has the patience to wait precisely thirty days in each cycle. Someone who has passed unseen for a year or more, committing a crime that nobody else has thought to commit. Someone with the heart of a predator.

Someone, he thinks, much like Light Yagami.

Christophe flaps his hands dismissively in response to Light's proffered business card. "Yes, yes, that lady policeman said that others would be coming by. What was her name? Marianne? Madeleine?"

"Marie," L says, scanning the sitting room for any traces of Agathe standing out under eight accumulated months' worth of dirt. "Marie Deneuve."

"Is that it?" Christophe frowns in concentration for a moment before shrugging the thought away. "Well, regardless. You said that you had questions. Ask." He shoves a pile of newspapers out of the way to sink into a couch which is clearly long past the end of its natural lifespan.

Light perches on the edge of a relatively clean wooden chair, somehow managing to make the pose look perfectly natural rather than fastidious. "I realize that you may have gone over these questions before, Christophe. But sometimes revisiting these scenarios can provide novel information-"

"Heard it," Christophe grunts. "Heard it all before. From the officers who arrested me, too," he adds, lip curling.

"Very well," Light says, seemingly unfazed. He's switching his speech patterns subtly but gradually in order to better match the witness, L notes. Soon, he'll undoubtedly start mirroring his posture, as well - small gestures, building a rapport, easing Christophe into a more mellow attitude. L's strategy is usually completely the opposite, of course - it's far more fun that way - but that doesn't mean that he doesn't enjoy watching an expert at work. "Perhaps you can start by answering something that has puzzled me, then. In your initial interviews with the police, you were very insistent that something bad had happened to Agathe to cause her disappearance. Yet she had been gone for less than twenty-four hours, and these small absences were by all accounts common. It was one of the things that led the police to suspect you, in fact."

"Idiots!" Christophe shakes his head vehemently, puncturing his words with sharp hand gestures that leave no doubt as to their meaning. "What did they think I could have done to Agathe? That I had locked her away somewhere and hadn't immediately been sent back to Purgatory for my sins? Or that I was some sort of moron, to commit some sort of crime and then immediately run to the police to report it?"

L has met stupider criminals, to be honest. Light has as well, of course, but he's far too polite to voice the thought out loud. More's the pity. "I understand," Light says patiently, "but why were you so insistent that something had happened to her? At that time, nobody knew whether or not she had left freely."

"Agathe did _not_ run away!" Christophe says forcefully, banging his fist on the arm of the sofa. "She would not have just...just..."

"Done a runner?" Mello says helpfully. Light whips around to glare at him.

The fire in Christophe's eyes disappears as quickly as it came. He sags backward, staring at his hands. "No," he says quietly. "No, she would not have. But the police, they did not believe me."

"That seems like a bit of a fuckup," Mello says. "In retrospect, at least."

"You said that you had a 'feeling' that she was in trouble," Light interjects loudly.

The man snorts bitterly. "Yes, for all the good it did me. I know that it sounds stupid; I couldn't put it in words, but..."

"But that's exactly it," Light says, leaning forward. "There's a reason we trust our instincts in dangerous situations. You might not have consciously noticed it, but at that time, there was some detail that stood out to you as wrong. Something that scared you enough to call the police in. And I'm sure that, since that moment, you've done nothing but think endlessly about what it was that bothered you about it."

"I...yes, that's it exactly!" He takes a moment to gather himself. "I thought, and I thought, and then...well, by that time, the police - they did not listen to me any more."

Light's gaze is steady. "You think you know what it was."

"I know that this will sound strange." Christophe pauses for a moment, seemingly gathering his thoughts. "Things are not as they were before my...my death. Eternity is a long time, and not everyone holds to marriage vows as they did before. So you must understand that though we each had our liaisons, even though we fought over them, we always ended up in the same place afterward. The fighting was a part of that cycle. It did not mean that we did not love each other. We just needed a little more time. That's all."

"We are not here to judge you," Light says smoothly. Shockingly, Mello somehow manages to restrain himself from speaking with another large bite of his chocolate bar.

"Perfume," Christophe says abruptly. "That scent of perfume would always linger in the air for hours; she would spray so damn much of it. Every time she left the house. But that night, I smelled no perfume. You understand?"

Their witness seems to have lost the ability to speak in complete sentences. This is probably L's cue to go. Now that he's built a solid rapport, Light hardly needs supervision to draw out the sordid details of the couple's love life, after all. And Christophe's comments have piqued a vague theory in L's mind, although he will need far more evidence than a few paltry suppositions to solidify it. He stands up abruptly, prompting an exasperated look from Light. "May I use your bathroom?"

Christophe snorts, mouth twisting wryly. "You mean, may you use the bathroom as an excuse to snoop around the house for clues?"

L hums, smiling at him innocently. "Only after I use the bathroom, of course. Searching your house comes after."

"L!" Light hisses.

Politeness is unnecessary. Christophe has been through enough scrutiny over the past several months to be resigned to his fate, and by L's reckoning, he seems to at least appreciate the honesty. "Go on," he says, waving his hands dismissively. "There's a bathroom ensuite to our bedroom. Agathe's things are still on the right-hand side. I haven't touched them."

L beams at him before slipping away. Behind him, he hears Mello moving to take his place. The rise of Light's blood pressure is almost audible.

Mentally adding 'irritatingly earnest books on meditation' to his list of possible birthday presents, he ascends the staircase, noting the layer of dust between the banister posts. Surprisingly, the master bedroom is slightly tidier than the rest of the house, although it's mainly by virtue of the fact that Christophe truly wasn't exaggerating about not having touched his wife's things. Her nightstand is immediately distinguishable by being probably the only surface in the house carefully dusted on a regular basis. A cheap thriller rests next to a bowl filled with miscellaneous jewelry pieces; an old-fashioned alarm clock teeters dangerously close to the edge. A bookmark still lies halfway between the abandoned novel's pages, waiting like Christophe in vain.

The police, of course, have already searched this place exhaustively over multiple visits. This information will be in the casebooks that Matt is currently poring over with Watari back at their base, along with pictures. L knows the details in broad strokes - Agathe took her purse, wallet, and stubbornly outdated phone with her, and hadn't left any sort of note behind. L isn't looking for some sort of hidden clue.

No, what he wants is insight into who Agathe Dumaine was. When he opens the walk-in closet, her clothes are all modern, and apparently organized seasonally; antique jewelry pieces, of which there are quite a few, have been tucked away carefully inside a dresser drawer, while the presumably frequently used pieces in the bowl on the nightstand appear to suit current trends. One drawer, presumably the designated junk storage site, is packed full of ancient electronic detritus - a long-dead PalmPilot electronic planner, a giant tangle of orphaned chargers, a clunky old e-reader with the plastic sticker still unpeeled from its surface. The drawer also contains a relatively new tablet that looks like it had been fairly well-used before the screen shattered, however.

He thinks of Agathe's personal effects, detailed in the police evidence log: a well-used laptop with an extensive social media presence, combined with a decidedly low-tech appointment book with each day's agenda neatly written out in pen. The first evidence of her true age, all things considered.

He begins to form a picture of her in his mind: someone with modern enough sensibilities and style, but still somewhat uncomfortable with the less social aspects of technology. Although perhaps, before her disappearance, she had been learning to grow accustomed to it.

Interesting.

He throws open Christophe's side of the closet. Unlike his wife, his clothes are well-worn and simple, those of a laborer; a battered toolbox with an easily pickable lock appears to be the only carefully maintained possession of his in the entire household, each tool polished and well-kept.

Come to think of it, Christophe doesn't seem to have many possessions at all, aside from the tools and a rather impressive collection of cigarette cartons. No other laptops are present, in the bedroom or the adjacent rooms. L does find a new-looking phone, a model that released less than a year ago. It's unlocked - L spares a moment to shake his head disapprovingly - and appears to have been purchased about a month after Agathe went missing, judging from the date on the phone cellular data statistics. The total call time on the phone is woefully low, and the contact book seems to be labeled primarily with the names of businesses rather than people. His browser history is equally uninteresting, full of news sites and how-to videos for DIY projects.

The bathroom cabinet contains a couple of bottles of antidepressants in Christophe's name, one empty; the prescription fill date on the empty bottle is only a couple of days after his wife's disappearance.

L closes the cabinet doors and moves quietly back down the stairs. The interview appears to be winding down to its conclusion, from the way Light's notebook sits closed on his lap and his posture on the chair. "All done?" Christophe says wryly.

"Yes, thank you," he says, smiling reassuringly. "I do have a few questions, however."

A wary expression creeps onto the man's face. "Oh?"

"What is there to do around here?"

Both Light and Christophe stare at him as though he's grown a second head. "I, uh..." He shakes his head, flummoxed. "Sorry, what?"

"For fun," L clarifies. "If you are in the habit of having fun, of course."

"Really, L?" Light hisses.

The widower thinks for a moment, anxiety crossing his features more than once. "I...there is a nice pub a few blocks from here," he says hesitantly.

L cocks his head. "Which you only began visiting recently, of course."

Astonishment colors Christophe's voice. "Well, yes, but how did-"

"Just one more question," L says. "Is there anyone who you confided in about your wife?"

Christophe's eyes flicker to meet his, suddenly wary. "What do you mean?"

L shrugs, keeping his voice casual. "About her affairs, her habits, anything. Before her disappearance, of course. A best friend, perhaps? Family members?"

But the man is already shaking his head. "I...I keep to myself," he says, folding his arms. "I never told anyone anything. Not that there was anything to tell, I mean-"

Mello coughs, perhaps somewhat indelicately. "Nothing? Really?"

Spots of color bloom in the widower's cheeks. "Nobody understands," he says, fists clenching spasmodically in his lap. "None of you will ever get it. She always came back before. That is all that mattered."

From Light's slight frown, L knows that he's picked up on it. "Thank you for your time, Monsieur Dumaine. We will be in touch if we find anything. We'd like to talk to any of your mutual friends or acquaintances to get a better picture of what may have happened. Could you suggest any names?"

"Agathe had a lot of friends," he mumbles. "Maybe...Ella, her colleague? Or Claire? The police have her planners and contact books, they should all be in there-"

"Actually, I was hoping to talk to some of your friends as well, Christophe," Light says quietly. "But I don't think you'll be able to give me any names on that front, will you?"

The excuses Christophe gives are almost depressing in their blandness. The remaining information they need is back at their base with Matt, and the house and its squalor are beginning to feel oppressive. "I think we have everything we need," L announces, turning to leave. "Thanks for your time." The taxi will take a few minutes to arrive, but he doesn't mind waiting outside in this case.

For once, neither Mello nor Light argue the decision.

***

"Okay, so that was all kinds of fucked up, right?" Mello blurts out as soon as they're seated in the cab, ignoring the twitches of the driver. "I got what you were implying, so I checked the DV reports while Captain Boring here was winding up, and there were at least three separate cases where the neighbours called in the cops because they heard her screaming-"

"But no charges were ever filed," Light interjects. "And there were never any mentions of marks on Agathe in any of the police reports."

"So L figured it out the interesting way," Mello says, shrugging. "Big surprise."

Both of them twist around in their seats to give him oddly accusatory looks. "You searched through his things, didn't you," Light says flatly.

L blinks innocently. "The witness invited me to conduct the search." 

Light pinches the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath. "The witness was being _sarcastic,_ L."

"That is merely a difference of interpretation."

"Oh, really," Light says, his voice low and dangerous. "Would you like to put a percentage on that?" 

L barely manages to keep the wince off his face. He had rather been hoping that Light would forget about Matt's offhand comment, but he supposes there is a 99.9% chance he ought to have known better.

"There," Mello says, satisfied. "Texted Matt to check the phone location tracking records for the two of them, as well as tracing Christophe's prior contacts. If he was Agathe's victim rather than the other way around, like everyone thought, we should be able to confirm it."

"That would give Christophe an excellent motive," Light says, frowning. "But the other disappearances are clearly related to Agathe's, and he wouldn't have been able to pull those off. I wonder if the possible abuse factored into the disappearance at all?"

"Perhaps," L says idly, "it gave the true culprit false security with the thought that Christophe would be far too relieved to make a fuss about her going missing."

A moment of thoughtful silence greets this pronouncement.

"Since it is, after all, important to be certain about things," Light says, voice dripping with scathing sarcasm, "we should avoid speculation until Matt gets back to us."

"Of course," L says agreeably. This doesn't seem to pacify Light in the slightest, who merely folds his arms and stares pointedly out the window. L considers this to be rather unfair, personally, but he knows from unfortunate experience that the only thing worse than trying to poke Light out of one of his inexplicable moods is pointing out that he's in a mood in the first place.

A few more moments of silence pass without anyone trying to metaphorically kill each other, which is already an improvement from their previous circumstances.

Then, in a slightly offended tone, Light says: "Mello...'Captain Boring?'"

"Okay, I really wasn't going to say it-"

"Oh, of course you weren't," Light mutters.

"-but man, you are boring as _fuck!_ You're lucky I kept that witness awake while we were interviewing him!"

"Excuse me?!" Light sputters. "What did you want me to do? Antagonize him repeatedly, like you did? _You're_ lucky I was there to calm him down-"

"Do they not have 'good cop, bad cop' in Interpol or something?" Mello says, rolling his eyes. "Don't you think it's absurd that I was stuck playing the bad cop when the other guy's a literal _serial killer?"_ The taxi driver makes a strangled sort of sound in the back of his throat. 

"Oh, please," Light scoffs. "You do realize that this isn't the Mafia, right? You can't just waltz in and intimidate people."

"Completely missing the point," Mello says in a long-suffering tone, not even bothering to curse. "Look, the pertinent information we got from talking to that guy was basically that Agathe was going somewhere she wasn't particularly happy about on the night she disappeared, right? The rest was in the police reports. And the possible emotional abuse by our supposedly saintly victim, but that was really more L's clue than yours."

Light looks torn between outrage at the acknowledgment of L's superior sleuthing skills and grudging astonishment at the fact that this is possibly the most civil thing Mello has said to him since they both died. "We developed a rapport with the misper's family member, and covered for L while he was shamelessly ransacking his house."

"He gave L _permission_ to shamelessly ransack his house," Mello says, shrugging. "I mean, not like L really cares, but it's the thought that counts and shit, right?"

"Is there a point to this, Mello?" Light says wearily.

"My point is, this is a detective _contest_ , not reruns of Captain Boring's Police Procedural show! We're competing against people with even less morals than L, which is really saying something-"

"And here I didn't think that was possible," Light murmurs, the wry smile on his face taking most of the sting out of the words.

"Sorry, only people with a kill count under 263 are allowed to make moral judgments here," Mello says, scowling.

L's interest is piqued momentarily. "That is a very specific number, Mello."

"And utterly arbitrary," Light drawls. "Why don't we round down to, say, 200?"

"Ha!" Mello says triumphantly. "I anticipated that shit! Joke's on you, asshole, I'm _way_ under 200!" Belatedly, the taxi driver whimpers loudly, evidently not reassured at all by this statement.

"You know," Light says to no-one in particular, "my standards have _really_ been in free-fall since I died, but I think this is a new low."

"All part of the plan," Mello says smugly, evidently content with his victory. L calculates that they have only four minutes and thirty-five seconds left on their journey, given the relatively light traffic. As long as anyone refrains from speaking further, it should give him some time to plan on countering Deneuve and Coil's next moves-

"So, uh, just to make sure," Mello says. "We _do_ have some sort of awesome overarching plan to win this thing, right?" He twists back in his seat to stare at L expectantly.

"Yes, of course we do," Light says, projecting enough serene confidence to actually make L believe him for a second. "Since it would be extremely irresponsible to go into this without any sort of plan, not to mention foolish. Right, L?" To L's horror, he joins Mello in giving him a very pointed stare.

He searches for something suitably unhelpful to say. "You forgot 'obstinate', 'pigheaded', and 'bloody-minded'."

"Aren't those all synonyms?" Mello says.

"L," Light says, his voice very steady. "Don't you _dare_ tell me you don't have a plan."

L sighs mournfully. His first instinct, of course, is to tell Light exactly that, but he recognizes that tone well enough. As a general rule, he isn't particularly fond of being straightforward - also known as being boring, in his opinion. Then again, he isn't particularly fond of sleeping on the couch, either.

"Very well," he says, steepling his fingers. "There are three primary questions which stand out in this case. First, the point of connection between the presumed victims. Are these disappearances induced by an external party - the more likely option - or have they been somehow co-ordinated by the mispers themselves? Matt will be focusing on analyzing the communications of each identified misper, as well as tracking of their movements and tracing of any past affiliations in both life or death, to find any possible links. Second, when was the true point in time at which these disappearances began? Identifying the starting point is often key in assessing a given crime's motivations and modus operandi; unfortunately, since our information specialist is occupied with the more immediately pressing first question, and given the difficulty of plucking useful information out of the sea of deaders and habitual mispers, I judge that our efforts would be better spent addressing the third." Deneuve will probably be focusing on that second question, to great success - he'll have to see if Matt and Watari can help with identifying and monitoring her team's movements for him to look over, on the side.

"Third would be the method of disappearance. Here, again, there are three main possibilities. We all agree, I am sure, that a kidnapping is the worst case scenario, as well as the most complicated one. In this case, the external party would have had to keep multiple victims incapacitated for long periods of time, ensuring that the location or locations in which the victims are kept remain undiscovered. Drugging and burying victims alive would be an effective way of accomplishing this, of course, but any perpetrator would have to do so without instantly popping off to Purgatory. Multiple perpetrators could account for it, of course, but with the time element and the sheer number of variables introduced, I consider this to be highly unlikely. The remaining options, then, are that the victims were either coerced or persuaded to run away by some external party, or co-ordinated such a thing among themselves; alternatively, they could have gone to Purgatory, which would make the co-ordination hypothesis more likely.

"This third question is what our team will be attempting to determine the answer to by re-examining witnesses, relatives, and retracing the victims' footsteps. Already, we have learned of a possible motivation for Agathe to merit a return to Purgatory, and that she appeared to have left the house specifically knowing that she was attending some sort of unpleasant or non-social task. We will go over Matt's collated data to identify promising links or missed opportunities in the police investigations, and build our hypotheses from there." He spreads his hands, smiling beatifically at Light and Mello. "That, essentially, is the plan. Any questions?"

Light's dropped jaw and wide-eyed look of astonishment are quite unwarranted. L does, occasionally, play nicely with others. He just makes sure to be _unpredictable_ about it.

"Holy fuck," Mello says approvingly.

"You know, Yagami-kun, I am going to have to explain this whole thing again to Matt and Watari as soon as we get back to base," L says reproachfully. "This was very inefficient of you."

In response, Light wordlessly undoes his seatbelt, closes the gap between them in the space of a millisecond, and pulls L into a long, passionate kiss. He grins at him as they pull slightly apart, hands still tangled in L's hair. "Positive reinforcement," Light practically purrs. L's treacherous mind actually begins to reconsider the benefits of co-operation before he firmly decides to ignore it.

"Here you go, man," Mello says loudly as the cab rolls to a stop, pulling a generous tip from his pocket. "You deserve it." The man looks too petrified to reach out and take the money, so Mello shrugs and leaves it on the dashboard.

Light straightens his collar, gives L a downright evil smirk, and proceeds to saunter casually out of the cab looking absolutely, infuriatingly, gorgeously unruffled.

L doesn't follow him immediately. Instead, he leans in closer to the cab driver. "Monsieur Durand," he says politely. "Coil does know that I keep up-to-date lists of his operatives, yes? And that, of course, since I have identified you, any information you may have heard cannot be delivered to Coil without breaking the rules of the game?"

The man sighs, shrugging his shoulders. "Worth a shot."

"But, just in case you get any clever ideas about transmitting information," L says, smiling at him. "I would consider that the good Madame Durand would not be best pleased to learn of possible transmissions of other kinds from the beautiful Mademoiselle Petite and her associates."

"Coil could say the same thing to me," the man says, raising his eyebrows expressively.

"And you could say to him that you could tell me that you passed on the information, and he'll have to forfeit," L says, his smile widening.

"You really do have no morals," the faux-cabbie says admiringly.

"Let me know if you're ever in the job market," L says amiably before exiting the cab.

"What took you so long?" Light asks, leaning in the doorway of the building.

"The two of you traumatized that poor man terribly," L says sorrowfully, shaking his head. "As the mature one here, it fell to me to clean up the mess." Light's eye-roll would probably do Mello proud, he thinks.

Watari waits inside, a wireless bug detector resting beside freshly baked mango tarts on the tray in his hands. L patiently waits for his turn to be scanned, wondering what Coil's actual move had been. The location of his and Coil's bases are hardly a secret, given the logistics involved in setting up in a different city. He's probably made a move on a lead of his own, one he wants to conceal from the other two competitors. Still, dealing with the other two detectives can wait until after Matt's briefing.

Because, even though victory is never technically certain, petty vindictiveness is his team's lifeblood.

Coil and Deneuve, he thinks, catching the wicked gleam in Light's eyes as he steals more than his fair share of tarts, will never know what hit them.

**Author's Note:**

> And so it begins! I apologize to those readers who had requested a follow-up oneshot focusing on Light and L's first meeting with Matt, Mello, and Watari after the first fic concluded. I began working on it, but wasn't happy with how the middle went and couldn't really settle on a satisfactory ending, so I decided to go ahead and start publishing this work first.
> 
> I haven't added an archive warning for violence at this juncture, since I don't think there will be any graphic details in this fic due to the nature of the crimes being investigated, but that may change later.


End file.
